Little Kinsey and Big Mo: Sue Grafton's P is for Peril Take one retired doctor, a trophy wife, and an embittered ex-wife; hide the Doc, toss in some squirrely offspring of various ages, and spice with just the slightest hint of Medicare fraud. Add a mildly antisocial female private eye. Shake well in a battered VW Beetle and allow to bake in the sun of coastal California for a few days. What do you get? you get Sue Grafton's latest Kinsey Millhone mystery, P Is for Peril. The question is, is it worth the effort?
P is for Plot
Dowan Purcell, a retired MD now heading up a nursing home, has been missing for weeks. The police aren't looking very hard for him: there's been no sign of foul play, and to tell the truth, old Dow's disappeared a time or two before. But his wife, Fiona -- the ex-wife he dumped for a stripper several years back, not the current one -- is concerned enough to put our Kinsey on the case. Not that Kinsey's terribly interested; something about the old gal rubs her the wrong way. But Kinsey's looking for a little seed money to set up an office of her own, so (with visions of a $1500 retainer check dancing in her head) she accepts the assignment.
The first order of business is to talk to Crystal, the current wife: think Pamela Anderson here, for this lady has had enough nips and tucks and insertions and augmentations to keep a Dallas plastic surgeon in bass boats for life. But Crystal's demeanor (that and obvious doting over her two kids) is at odds with the physical image. In fact, Kinsey kinda likes her -- lots more, anyway, than Fiona, her dried-up prune of a client with an overwrought sense of self.
Though she tries mightily, Kinsey can't seem to find the missing doctor. She does get to meet Doc's younger daughter (perpetually pregnant and probably a french fry short of a happy meal), Crystal's ex-husband (Mr. Good-Times leech) and daughter (fourteen going on thirty-six, with a chip on her shoulder the size of the Starship Enterprise). Kinsey also wanders through the halls of the Doc's nursing home, in the process tripping over an ongoing investigation of "irregular" billing of Medicare claims... Hmmm, could that be why the Doc's gone missing? shame? fear? murder?
Meanwhile, Kinsey's found a great little office space to call her own; and there are even two very cute (but somewhat young) guys for landlords. Something about 'em is a little off, though...
H is for ho, hum...
Of course, the Doc's dead (no surprise). And, of course, Kinsey ultimately solves the case... but not before explaining yet again (sixteen books in a row, ain't it?) her philosophy of wardrobe (one all-purpose dress made from a petroleum product, jeans, sweaters, sweats, boots); exercise (run three miles six mornings a week, always on the same beach); and food (never bother learning to cook, eat only peanut butter-cheese sandwiches). As I said about O is for Outlaw, this character is getting a bit old.
S is for Stupid Coincidences
And, of course, one of Kinsey's circle of aging friends (apparently an AARP chapter has formed around her life) gives her a little task to work on in her spare time: trying to straighten out a departed sibling's nursing-home bills. And the deceased just happened to have spent time in Dr. Dow's care, and just happened to have some irregular bills that just happened to get posted against her account after her departure (of both the nursing home and this mortal coil). Gee, I love! coincidences, don't you???
Look, Sue, instead of using Rosie's late and unlamented sister as the great coincidence in the sky, it would been way more reasonable to put Kinsey in touch with some patient's family in the course of her investigation. Then she could've gotten the suspicious bills by being a detective, not by being a neighbor. Sheesh!
B is for Big Mo
A few presidential election cycles ago, one candidate or another kept crowing about "Big Mo" going into that year's version of Super Tuesday. He wasn't talking about the battleship U S S Missouri, though. He'd borrowed yet another analogy from a Monday Night Football commentator, and was nattering on about momentum. Somehow, the candidate's leap from fifth-place finisher in Iowa to fourth in New Hampshire was supposed to translate into a big win. I forget who it was; probably the likes of Gary Hart or Thomas Eagleton or Richard Lugar. Not all that much momentum, eh?
Those who would write a book series must survive through the offices of the politician's friend, "Big Mo." Get enough readers hooked on your character -- Spenser, Poirot, Warshawski -- and you can just about start phoning in your next book. "Plot development, schmlot development," you giggle as you pop the cork on another magnum of Dom. "Characters? Who needs em?" you chortle as you spread beluga on a cracker that looks like a Ritz but costs six times as much.
This is not to say that Sue Grafton merely phoned in the manuscript of P Is for Peril, though I will argue that she had put in a bit less effort than necessary for volumes M through O. What must be said, though, is that the Millhone character gets flatter and flatter with every book in the series, and Grafton seems to be thrashing about in the yellow pages looking for new industries to research -- actually, that last is a good thing.
P is for Peril is (or so I think) a slight improvement over the last couple of installments in the alphabet series, but there are still holes in plots and characters. For instance, the Doc's whacked-out daughter provides some comic relief, but simply appears for an interview and then disappears immediately afterwards, leaving only questions in her wake. "What was the point?" I wondered. And that final denoument was painfully obvious from the moment of Kinsey's first visit to the widow's beach house.
It's time for Kinsey to grow up. Sue, I suggest that you take a hiatus for a couple of letters; maybe work on something more up-to-date. Pretty please?